Of seediness and salvation

Graham Greene died yesterday at the age of 86. The bright outline of his life looks ironical in the context of his dark message. After Berkhamsted School, where his father was headmaster, and Balliol he worked on the Times and the Spectator, and during the second world war for the Foreign Office; for some years he also worked in publishing. His first novel appeared in 1929; the one most central to his purpose, appropriately called The Heart Of The Matter, came some 20 years later and marked the height of a reputation that had been steadily rising - the sort of popular esteem at home and abroad to which serious English writers of our time are scarcely accustomed.

This middle-class, middle-brow success story must appear, to those who feel that a writer's travail of spirit should be traceable in his biography, too good to be true. Greene has himself, in various circumstantial if somewhat oblique pieces about his early life, sketched in some darker shading. He indicates a childhood adequately planted with seeds of woe, and describes various youthful acts of desperation like 'Russian roulette' gambling on a one-in-six chance of death with a single bullet in a revolver.

Yet Greene's extreme pessimism about the prospects of man is not so much the individual blighted by experience as the entire human race 'implicated,' in Newman's words, 'in some terrible aboriginal calamity.' Greene follows this theme with a single-mindedness appalling to many readers. His view of the fallen world, expressed at its starkest in Brighton Rock, colours all he wrote; even what he called the 'entertainments' look the same way and are marked with this 'distrust in any future based on what we are.'

After a brief affair with the Communist Party at Oxford he withdrew quietly, disillusioned. He became a Roman Catholic at the age of 22, three years before his books began to appear. They came with a rush, the first ten in as many years, though later he worked more slowly.

In the first three, The Man Within, The Name Of Action, and Rumour At Nightfall he had not yet learned what he later did so superbly: to discipline his narrative to the service of his ideas. Then came It's A Battlefield, England Made Me, Brighton Rock, and the book that still attracts and repels more than any other: The Power And The Glory, with its disreputable priest and its unholier-than-thou air of moral paradox. These, interspersed with entertainments (Stamboul Train, A Gun For Sale, The Confidential Agent, and The Ministry Of Fear), carried Greene into the war. The next novel, The Heart Of The Matter, did not appear until 1948: the less satisfying End Of The Affair followed in 1951, The Quiet American in 1955, and the moralistic farce Our Man In Havana in 1958.

The novelist who interested him most was Henry James. Other obvious influences are Conrad and Mauriac, whose translated work he handled as a director of Eyre and Spottiswoode. The French have repaid the compliment by treating his philosophy with great respect, from existentialist and other angles.

English criticism has been for the most part less ambitious. It is doubtful if anyone has ever written about him without using the word 'seedy' at least once, and his mingled air of shabbiness and salvation is indeed unique. There have been writers with more profound a sense of evil but probably none, in our time and in our language, who has articulated it with such drive and technique. Greene's speed and economy, his uncanny gift for idiom so that a laconic phrase can set off vibrations far beyond the page, his skill in setting an atmosphere and developing suspense, are all masterly.

Even melodrama, which he uses often, has the air of being compulsive rather than contrived. When driven to miracles, as in The End Of The Affair and his play, The Potting Shed, he gives the impression of smashing a window to let in life and air on suffocating humanity. The astonishing thing, in view of his characters' lack of self-determination as victims of Greene's fixed idea about the hopeless condition of man, is that he is never a bore.

His technique, particularly in the more swiftly moving 'entertainments,' owes much to films and two stories, The Third Man and The Fallen Idol, were brilliantly transferred to the screen by Carol Reed. That his gifts for economical and highly-charged dialogue would also suit the theatre must long have been evident, though he did not turn to this medium until 1953, when The Living Room, still harping on the theme of the inadequacies of human love, won a big success. There was a stage version of The Power And The Glory and then, in 1958, Sir John Gielgud produced Greene's second but less successful play, The Potting Shed, about a man's struggle to exorcise the terror of his childhood.

With the turn of the decade Greene's public face relaxed a little. In 1960 the film of Our Man In Havana, with strong farcical elements, was running in London at the same time as his play The Complaisant Lover, involving a shrewd moral switch in which the lover is the injured, defensive party and the husband the challenger.

Drabness was accentuated in later novels like A Burnt-Out Case, the ashes deriving from the hell of human uninvolvement, and The Comedians, about broken-down lives in darkest Haiti. If Greene's key characters had been animals one cannot help feeling that they would have been compassionately put down: if they had been machines they would have been beyond servicing and irrevocably destined for the scrapyard. Machine-like, in the moral sense, they sometimes tended to look foredoomed victims of that 'terrible aboriginal calamity'. The Seventies dawned more cheerfully with Travels With My Aunt, a picaresque comedy that arrived nowhere very identifiable but travelled, for Greene, quite hilariously.

The famous seediness was discovered early and jealously tended. He was afraid of becoming a grandee and consciously rescued himself from fine writing ('a disease I'd got by absorbing all the worst influences of Conrad,' as he put it in an interview) with the first of his 'entertainments,' Stamboul Train. He had an attractive gift for self-parody.

On returning to Sierra Leone in 1967 after a quarter-century he found eveything too comfortable: 'I felt the guilt of a beachcomber manque: I had failed at failure.' It might have been his whisky-priest speaking. A clue to much of Greene is to be found in his comment on the darker side of Dickens, revealing 'the eternal and alluring taint of the Manichee, with its simple and terrible explanation of our plight, how the world was made by Satan and not by God, lulling us with the music of despair.'

The religious aspect of Greene's fiction had led to irritations and confusions which he has done little to resolve deliberately little, as it would sometimes seem. Often, he has told us, he has felt the need to insist that he is 'not a Catholic writer but a writer who happens to be a Catholic.' Yet he would not have written the novels he did write if he had not been a Catholic and a convert; it may be that he would not have written novels at all. He has also put it on record that his was originally an intellectual rather than an emotional conversion, with his professional work and his religion contained in 'quite separate compartments.' It was later that he became preoccupied with the effect of faith on action, the mainspring of the key novels.

Even in The Human Factor (1978), ostensibly a worldly book about spying and defection, spiritual profundities are sounded off and the church confessional is brought into the picture though in an expository way, to further the commentary-sermon rather than the action. In introducing this novel with characteristic ambivalence Greene prudently insists that it was all invented, yet at the same time quotes Hans Andersen's comment that 'out of reality are our tales of imagination fashioned.' His critics really had some excuse for their frequent bafflement.

Another complaint he had against them was when they implied that his personal 'Greeneland' had little to do with the contemporary world as observed by reporters and war correspondents.

On the contrary, he would insist that he was a much-travelled professional observer who described that world, horrors and all, with unflinching accuracy. Yet he also had to admit that there was realism and realism: the Brighton he wrote about in Brighton Rock, though he knew the place well, was not the Brighton a reporter would have presented. This fundamental ambiguity was in ironical contrast to the edge and clarity of his line-by-line writing.

Dr Fischer Of Geneva or The Bomb Party, which followed in 1980, was a brilliantly accomplished handling of the Russian roulette theme, removing it from the sphere of self-indulgence and broadening it into a parable about human greed, hate, compassion and salvation a large package to handle, but Graham Greene was never afraid of those. Again he had produced a telling spiritual melodrama, streaked with black farce. This darkly comic element has been little discussed by writers on Greene, perhaps because it tends to be masked by his studied flatness of style. Like it or not, it was a style entirely his own, more immediately recognisable than any other current novelist's.

Greene also wrote a number of books for children, two excellent travel books (The Lawless Roads and Journey Without Maps), and some fugitive literary essays which, though undeveloped, are full of penetration. He did interesting film criticism (collected by John Russell Taylor in a volume called The Pleasure Dome) for the Spectator and the short-lived magazine Night And Day - short-lived because of a famous libel suit he attracted when he inveighed against the 'dimpled depravity' of Shirley Temple (who in a Greene-like metamorphosis, currently stars as President Bush's ambassador in Prague). Even in extreme age, he became a formidable campaigning journalist in corrupt Nice, with its mayor Jacques Medecin as his principal target. The Greene output is now wound down: the Greene industry, one fears, will be shifting into overdrive.

 Graham Greene, born October 2, 1904; died April 3, 1991.

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Of seediness and salvation

This article was published on
the Guardian website
at 12.22 EST on Thursday 4 April 1991.
It was last modified at 10.20 EST on Thursday 16 December 2010.
It was first published at 13.22 EST on Wednesday 10 November 1999.